Trouble Rides Tall / Cross the Red Creek / Desert Stake-Out Read online

  TROUBLE RIDES TALL

  Bryant Shafter is the trouble marshal. Town leaders call him in when they need a gun to quiet things down. Which is why Bry settled in Pony Wells. But now the town is under control. They don’t need him anymore—more particularly, they don’t need to be paying his salary. Even his young deputy, Zach Adams, thinks it’s time he moved on. So when three businessmen from Gravehead make him an offer to leave Pony Wells to clean up their town, he’s sorely tempted—holding down the law is what Bry does best. Until a young prostitute named Glory is found murdered. Until the town bosses hire their own guns. Until a young buck named Rio, out to prove himself, comes gunning for him. Now Bry’s got a townful of trouble.

  CROSS THE RED CREEK

  Jim Gilmore is on the run from the rumors that plague him. When he is mistaken for a bank robber in Kiowa, Wyoming, he decides to take a stand. He knows he’s innocent, so he turns himself in—and is acquitted. But he remains guilty in the eyes of the town folk. Still, Gilmore is looking for a place to settle down, and decides that Kiowa is no worse than anywhere else. People will talk wherever you go. But trouble seems to follow Gilmore, and he is soon accused of another robbery. This time he figures it’s personal, and if he doesn’t find out who’s trying to frame him, he might find himself at the end of noose instead.

  DESERT STAKE-OUT

  There is an epidemic at San Carlos, and Blade Merrick is riding the medicine wagon across Apache territory. That’s when he meets up with Hardhead Charley Clinton, his son Billy, and Perch Fisher… and Valerie, headed out West with her husband. They had all just met when they were attacked by Apaches. Merrick leads them to a water hole he knows about. Merrick has been here before—this is where he found the bullet-ridden body of his brother. Now, he has a new problem, because the Clinton gang wants to go to Fort Ambush, in the opposite direction. And they’ve got the guns to back up their request. Merrick finds himself torn between the returning Apaches, the desperation of three hardened men, and the most desirable woman he has ever met in his life.

  TROUBLE RIDES TALL / CROSS THE RED CREEK / DESERT STAKE-OUT

  Published by Stark House Press

  1315 H Street

  Eureka, CA 95501

  [email protected]

  www.starkhousepress.com

  TROUBLE RIDES TALL

  Copyright © 1958 by Harry Whittington, and published in hardback by Abelard-Schuman, London, and in paperback, 1960, by Crest Books, Greenwich. Copyright © renewed January 7, 1986 by Harry Whittington.

  CROSS THE RED CREEK

  Copyright © 1964 by Harry Whittington and published by Avon Books, New York.

  DESERT STAKE-OUT

  Copyright © 1961 by Fawcett Publications, Inc., and published by Gold Medal Books, Greenwich. Copyright © renewed January 18, 1989 by Harry Whittington.

  Permission to reprint granted by the Estate of Harry Whittington. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  “Harry and the Cowboys” copyright © 2016 by David Laurence Wilson

  ISBN-13: 978-1-944520-11-3

  Cover design and layout by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  First Stark House Press Edition: November 2016

  FIRST EDITION

  Harry and the Cowboys

  by David Laurence Wilson

  “From the first, the field of Western fiction has been a paradise for the beginning writer. Story plots were there for the taking; rustling, land and water squabbles, the legendary feats of cowboy and outlaw, of peace officer and gambler and stage robber.” —Editor Joe Shaw, in Spurs West, 1951.

  It’s been said that a western is basically a period crime story.

  It’s a proposition that isn’t always true but often enough, it is, and by this reasoning the distinction between a western and a crime novel is defined by date and wardrobe and not by the hearts or minds of the characters.

  Unfortunate events—robbery, death and misfortune—don’t occur strictly by the dates on a calendar.

  A wholly innocent man afoot in the desert, city or swamp can be just as dead in any century. His family can be in equal danger. The pain and disorientation of various beatings and knockdowns can apply to any man, a frontier sheriff or modern white collar worker. Or a man on a rare drunk. You can slip or fall and two seconds later you’re off your game and you look homeless and flawed.

  Still, westerns and crime, they aren’t the same. You’re always going to find the books stacked in different aisles. Usually the westerns are the most beaten up books in the store, as if they’ve actually been carried around in someone’s back pocket and the next reader isn’t going to care.

  At Stark House it is not inconsistent to embrace western stories. In this new series, Noir of the West, you will find a darker west, sometimes an exaggerated or unexpected type of western locale. It is an atmosphere created by writers not immediately connected with the genre. Harry Whittington, W. R. Burnett, Gil Brewer, Sid Fleishman, Clifton Adams, Ed Gorman, Arnold Hano, Bill Pronzini, Robert Randisi … all these men wrote westerns. None of them lost their talent when they switched categories.

  W. R. Burnett is a good example. He wrote both crime and western novels, and his gangster novels High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle became both crime and western films. Even James M. Cain wrote a Civil War novel.

  It was not always a personal choice that led writers to the western genre. It was simply good to be versatile. A prideful fiction writer could claim to write anything, in any category. And quickly, too, because their raw material was the whole range of humanity. Most of the crime writers wrote sports, at one time or another, and westerns, too. Sometimes the curve went the other way, and the sports writer would start writing detective stories. But not too many of the science fiction writers wrote westerns. Murray Leinster and Richard Matheson were two of the unusual ones.

  Like actors, commercial fiction writers had to finesse a balance between typecasting and the need to diversify. Typecasting was good for security, but pseudonyms and multiple publishers were the way to generate the kind of volume these writers needed. You could get a reputation, sometimes, a featured name, and sometimes you could create a character who would keep you in the game for most of your career. A writer who could make a living from a single book, however, was as rare as a writer being eaten by a shark. Maybe it worked for Dale Carnegie but not many.

  • • •

  The name Harry Whittington (1915-1989), should be familiar. This volume joins nine Whittington novels already reprinted by Stark House. It also represents the first new edition of Whittington’s western writing in over twenty-five years.

  Between 1958 and 1964, a seven-year period, Harry Whittington published fifty-three novels, eleven of them westerns, including the three novels in this collection: Trouble Rides Tall (1958), Desert Stake-Out (1961) and Cross the Red Creek (1964).

  This averaged out to almost eight original novels a year, the kind of production that earned Whittington the title, “King of the Paperbacks.” Yes, many of these novels were short. Whittington was not a Dickens; his descriptions were concise. Trouble Rides Tall (1958), one of Whittington’s most successful novels, was just 124 pages long. Also, some of the books were extrapolations from stories Harry had written earlier, something like cut and paste jobs but with variations that offered new plot opportunities. Often these situations were written more artfully the second time around.

  When it came down to economics, writing was piecework. Harry Whittington was paid a set sum when a novel was printed. The more books published, the better.

  In his most productive years Harry had an even quicker pace, writing and publishing thirteen or fourteen novels a year. Even those who might have questioned Whittington’s literary merit were hesitant to question his volume. He was a workhorse.

  Harry used many iterations of his given name: Whit Harrison, Hallam Whitney, Harry White, Howard Winslow and Henri Whittier. Then he wrote under “house names,” ultimately using over fifteen different names during his career.

  Harry was not a strategic writer; he just wrote. As long as he kept working, he figured, he could stay ahead. To keep working, he wrote in many categories: romance, true crime, sex and southern potboilers. His primary markets were crime fiction and westerns. In the westerns he was all over the place: hired guns, stories for juvenile readers, Ace doubles and a sixties “sex” publisher, hardbacks and paperbacks, movie adaptations, film sales and a handful of serious western novels.

  • • •

  The content of Harry’s stories, as well as their volume, deserves attention. A Whittington story offered a simple, compelling premise and unsettling forms of jeopardy for its heroes, western or contemporary. In his westerns he w
rote about racism, disadvantage, and the relationships between U. S. citizens and those on the country’s Southern border.

  Whittington’s westerns offered intimate relationships offset by vast distances, transient town marshals and small towns brushed against the base of mountains. It is striking how much these stories are tales of space and distance, of transportation that used up more days in shorter lives than we possess today. These characters weren’t commuters. They were loners; they were on the move and they were leaving their failures behind, following dreams and avoiding posses. Whittington heroes were outsiders, dreamers who learned how to fail on remote, arid patches of ranch. In western or contemporary stories, most of Harry’s characters were on the run.

  For Whittington, the western market was a faithful mistress but it was seldom his first choice. On occasion, as in the case of these three novels, he was deserving of the genre’s affection. He wrote several fine stories in the field. His west was just as challenging and dangerous as any of the urban alleys of his contemporary dramas. A couple of his biggest sellers and moneymakers were westerns.

  In truth, for Harry, the west was a long way off. An (almost) life-long Floridian, Harry learned his west from movies, Federal Writer’s Project Guides, and some unhappy years on his family’s subsistence farm.

  In 1988 he addressed a Florida writer’s group: “I could write “cattle country” fiction because I lived in my teen years on a farm with cows. We had less than a hundred, but when you’ve known one cow, you’ve known a thousand.”

  Over eighty-five years later, Harry’s son, Howard Whittington, offered a clarification: The family had ONE cow. There were lucky to get enough milk from that cow to feed themselves.

  Harry had been a mailman since 1934. In 1942, he was twenty-seven years old, married to Kathryn, with two children: Harriet and baby Howard. That was the same year Harry began writing and editing the St. Petersburg Advocate, along with The Florida Letter Carrier, a monthly magazine for mailmen.

  In 1943 Whittington sold nine short fiction pieces to the United Features Syndicate. Kathryn was reading the author Max Brand in a western pulp magazine. She suggested Harry try a western novel. He wrote one, A Gun In One Hand.

  In 1944 he entered The World Before Us, a manuscript in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a “New Writer’s Contest” sponsored by Doubleday and 20th Century Fox. Whittington received encouragement but no sales and no publication.

  In 1945 he was drafted. During two years of Navy service, as a Petty Officer in San Francisco and at the submarine base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, he distributed mail. He also worked with a Doubleday editor on ten more versions of The World Before Us.

  In 1946 Harry’s western sold to Phoenix Press and was published as Vengeance Valley. He completed his two book contract for Phoenix with the romance Her Sin (1947).

  Harry had no trouble coming up with plots. It could be quite mechanical. Sometimes he’d arrange a column of words like a dadaist with categories of characters, locales and dramatic events. Then he mixed them together, giving chance a role in his selections.

  In order to publish 180 novels, Whittington had to get the most out of every story idea he encountered. He’d switch around the pieces of his stories and try them in new combinations. Nearly 20 years after its publication, Her Sin was cannibalized by one of Harry’s pseudonyms for Baby Face (1966), the same story but with less encumbering clothing.

  After World War Two, Harry used his G.I. Bill to fund a correspondence course produced by Thomas H. Uzzell, of Stillwater, Oklahoma (“Low Cost Authoritative Instructions For Writers On The Make”). For his assignments Harry wrote from the heart with a chip on his shoulder. He wrote about the unfairness and insecurity of an impoverished childhood. He didn’t write Christmas scenes and he just couldn’t seem to write from an establishment point of view. The Uzzel team noted that Whittington had a flair for irony.

  Early in 1948 the Whittingtons had saved enough money to have their St. Petersburg house painted. Instead, Kathyrn urged Harry to use the money for a trip to a writer’s conference in Chicago. At the conference he met W. T. Brannon, a crime writer and agent who told him that he knew of a market for mystery and crime stories.

  Whittington followed up on Brannon’s urging and in the summer of 1948, his first attempt, “A Woman in the Case,” a crime novelette featuring private eye Pat Raffigan, was sold to King Features. It became the first of seven Raffigan stories for the syndicate.

  Harry was writing as much as he could in the mornings, before he began delivering mail. To his children, it seemed that he was always working; the sound of his manual typewriter was a constant in their home. There were other routines and occasions, too: dancing at a nearby ballroom or a night at the movies, I Love Lucy in the early evening and a social life with fellow paperback writers Day Keene and Gil Brewer.

  Whittington sold crime stories to Dime Detective and Detective Tales. Extensions magazine bought “My Mother Had a Lover,” a story about a boy who tries to break up a romance between his widowed mother and a mailman. He sold six stories to Mammoth Western: “Find This Man—With Bullets,” “Dark Duel,” “Wyoming Wild Catter,” “Last Wagon For Hell,” “Vengeance In The Sun,” “Mayor Steps In” and “Let Gallows Wait.” The magazine folded before the last two sales were printed. “Give a Man Rope” was sold to 15 Western Tales.

  Soon Whittington was making more money writing fiction than carrying letters. In 1948 he quit his job with the postal service.

  In 1950 Harry’s first paperback, Slay Ride For A Lady) sold to Handibooks, beginning what Whittington called “The Cadillac Years,” 1951-1963, when the growing market for original paperbacks soaked up all the short novels he could produce. After all the years of practice his style came together quickly. He became a writer of intense, compulsively paced crime novels. All that writing and all that reading paid off. Harry bought a Cadillac with cash.

  • • •

  Whittington wrote only one western among his first thirty-eight paperbacks but began working regularly in the genre after Saddle the Storm (Gold Medal, 1954) received the Western Writers of America’s Golden Spur Award for the best paperback of the year. This novel had it all: tragedy, sacrifice, redemption and deft plotting. Shadow At Noon (Pyramid, 1955), was published with the pseudonym “Harry White.”

  Harry also began writing again for King Features. Over the next two and a half years he sold 23 nine and ten thousand word novelettes that were serialized in newspapers. The majority of these were westerns. The first was “Vengeance Trail,” a rewrite of his 1950 novelette “Vengeance in the Sun” with a new western-sounding pseudonym, “Hondo Wells.” The second, “Gun of Doom,” was a rewrite of “Dark Duel.” A few years later, three of these serials became the basis for forty-five and fifty-thousand word novels published by Ace Double Books.

  In 1957 Whittington wrote adaptations of two late noir films, Temptations of Valerie, a post civil war story, and Man in the Shadow, a contemporary western dealing with migrant farmworkers.

  Harry had always been a movie fan, even before he began working at St. Petersburg’s Capitol Theater as an assistant manager. In the act of crafting these novelizations, however, Whittington came as close as he would ever come to cinematic genius.

  Valerie was based on the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s experiment with multiple viewpoints in Rashomon (1950). Whittington’s adaptation of the motion picture is seamless, giving three characters a chance to tell their stories during court testimony. Harry had a great talent for knowing when to jump in and out of a scene.

  Beginning with the title, this book did as much as it could to disguise its dirty little secret, that this novel was in fact a western story. It was marketed, it seemed, as an Anita Ekberg novel, with a cover featuring a closeup of Ekberg, from her breasts to the top of a timeless, tousled haircut. It warned: “She drove men to outrage and—murder!”